Funding a Racially Just Food System - Funders Briefing Hosted by Community Food Funders

*This PNY-co-sponsored program is hosted by our partner, Community Food Funders (CFF), who has extended an invitation to PNY members. Space is limited and will be granted on a first come, first served basis.*

Racism is built into the DNA of the United States’ food system. It began with the genocidal theft of land from First Nations people, and continued with the kidnapping of skilled farmers from the shores of West Africa. Under the brutality of the whip and the devastation of broken families, enslaved Africans cultivated the tobacco and cotton that made America wealthy.

But the story doesn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Later came convict leasing, a form of legalized slavery that kept many Southern black people on plantations—in some places until the late 1920s. Just a few decades later, Congress created the migrant guest-worker program, which imported agriculturalists from Mexico and other countries to labor in the fields for low wages.

All of this history combines to produce the racism we witness today in the food system. Farm management is among the whitest professions, while farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited. Meanwhile, people of color tend to suffer from diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and obesity, and to live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods—high-poverty areas flooded with fast food and corner stores, but lacking healthy food options.

Our food system needs a redesign if it’s to feed us without perpetuating racism and oppression. How can the funding community best leverage its resources and influence to end racism in the food system?

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Concrete next steps toward a collective vision of a just and sustainable food system

How to make our organizational structures and grantmaking procedures more equitable and accountable to communities of color